[Live] The Others, 21st July

Had a great gig at The Others on Thursday, playing with Shugoran - me, Will Connor and Dayvid Q. 

Stonking night and Dayvid was excellent, hoping we do more gigs in future - this was only our second or third.

Thanks to Max for putting us on and for his excellent performance of part of the Maldoror by Lautreamont.

[Live] Holloway Arts Festival

I am playing live as part of the Holloway Arts Festival as part of the Nameless and Unexplained quintet on Saturday 11th June 2011 at 1pm. The address is:

The Old Fire Station

84 Mayton Street

N7 6QT

As far as I can see entry is free.

The quintet is 

Me - probably playing found objects and percussion

Sonia Paco-Rochia - Bassoon

Arthur Swindells - Brass (Arthur is the live sound engineer for Faust)

Daniel Thompson - Guitar

Will Connor - Percussion (and my bicycle as ever)

But we may well be performing as a sextet as Anthony from Vultures Quartet should be making it down to London and I imagine will be playing acoustic bass.

This is an ad hoc quintet or sextet (whatever it turns out to be).  It will be a 50 min totally acoustic set, totally improvised. I haven't even played with Arthur, Sonia or Daniel before, although I am familiar with Arthur's playing and I am recording some electro acoustic improvisations with Daniel and Will today.

[Recording] Mutatorator

Just finished a new piece which I have uploaded to my website called "Mutatorator".

It's basically an experiment in using Pd for realtime processing of sound. It's an amalgam of 11 very short  pieces made using the patch to process a classical guitar. 

It uses a looping samplers and weirdly configured random delay lines and even a bit of Karplus Strong magic. 

Go on, have a listen, you know you want to.

[Recording] Millipede

Just uploaded a new track to my site called Millipede. This was made for Classwar Karaoke survey 0014. CK is a quarterly digest of experimental music run by Anthony from Vultures Quartet and friends of his.

It's a really interesting project and more than worth checking out and keeping an eye on.

The track is another using an actual rhythm (!) along with some glassy sounding algorithmically tuned synths and random delays. I don't know what is going on with this current obsession with using rhythm in Pd, but it's a lot of fun. 

[News] Gigs, Recordings, Java

The next Miller Test gig will be at 229 - a club on Great Portland Street - 229 - we'll be on at 8.30pm and we'll be "showcasing" our new backing singers and some songs you haven't heard before. Emma and Ida are great singers and we've been working on harmonies for them, in fact we're doing more this afternoon in  the luxurious environs of The Premises.

I've submitted a track for the forthcoming Classwar Karaoke compilation - a kind of weird, glassy, algorithmic, downtempo electronic thing. So, all three Vultures will be on it as solo artists (Astrometria - ie me, Will Connor and murmurists - Anthony). As I mentioned before there will be some famous names on this one including Fred Frith.

Seth and I have done some more work on the video looping project, well actually, to be fair Seth has digitised a load of old video material ready for looping. I am still trying to work out exactly how to display it and use OpenCV to control the program or patch I write for it. I'm going to forge ahead using Pd/GEM but I also had a look at using Java. I programmed Java professionally for a few years and one of the things I used was QuickTime for Java. Having not used it for a while I was a little saddened to see that it has been deprecated. In fact Apple did that in 2009 - shows it has been a while since I looked at that API!

I had a look at Java Media Framework but I just don't think it will cut the mustard for what I am trying to do which is a shame. I have seen a similar application to the one I am trying to write built with Max/MSP/Jitter - but I can't afford Max so that's a no go. I just need to work out how to display and manipulate several videos with audio in Pd/GEM I think. I could try Processing but the overhead is immense compared to Pd so that choice is a no brainer.

Some people I have mentioned this to have asked why I don't program this thing in Flash - the simple answer is twofold: I can't afford the development tools and more importantly Flash is the only thing that makes my computer so hot that the fans in it are running so quickly it sounds like it might take off... remember the sound of the nine (?) fans in the old G5 Mac Pro things when you booted into single user mode? Very similar... 

[Mixing] Compilations

Vultures Quartet were asked to contribute a track to this compilation (sorry you need to be logged into Facebook to see this). 

I mixed a track from our last recording session in February for this.

We'll also be on the forthcoming Classwar Karaoke compilation due for release later this month, I think.  CK is run by, amongst others, Anthony Donovan from Vultures Quartet. 

The track is from the same recording session.

This should be an interesting compilation and apparently it will include a track by Fred Frith - so definitely worth a listen.

[Live] The Miller Test at Cargo

We're playing at Cargo on Friday 13th May. I don't think we'll be listed as it's a last minute booking (obviously).  We're on at 7.45pm.

We'll be playing a new song amongst the other stuff too.

If you come to see us it's a fiver to get in - the usual price is £20 so if you like the place you can get in for £5 and stay all night. Just think of all the extra beer you can afford...